The part each of us played in the ongoing saga begins to fade even before our passing. Our moments are brief and our timeline fades through disuse.
For the young, the stories adults tell are a confusion of meaningless names and strange events that happened to someone else. Without the perspective of age needed to appreciate or understand their history, today is their most important time. Last year is barely remembered and tomorrow is too far away to matter.
Me in my first photo
For the old, past events are forgotten or not important. After all, what does it matter that I was a mill worker a soldier, a mother, a farmer or a chemist? Who cares that I was rich or poor? What did I do with my life? What was my family like?
Who cares if I had a beloved dog or brown hair, pain, disappointment, or love?
Who cares that I WAS?
Each of us participates in a time puzzle. We help create a future that will not be the same without us. We were all made from the past and we all make a small difference in the lives of others. It does matter that we were here.
And we all wonder: "What were my ancestors like?"
The answers to most of these questions will never be found, but we do owe it to ourselves to record as many of the facts as we can so that they will not be forgotten; so that in a hundred years, we will be remembered....and thanked...for collecting facts that otherwise would have been lost forever.
What is our family history? The past relationships are incredibly complex; our ancestors number in the millions and the details of even our grandparents' lives disappear like an invisible thread into the past. With each generation, our past becomes more complex and harder to grasp and more of it is lost in the dust of time.
Each of us is a short chapter in a very long book that may have no end. Some chapters are longer and some are shorter, but each contains information that makes the history of our family worth recording. In two hundred years, in a library repository yet to be built, the chapters we write will be waiting for our parts of the puzzle to be told.
We can speak directly to the future, and we can begin this collective gift to future generations by recording the pieces of what we know and providing a written record to pass on to those who come after us.
Each of us knows about our own life and that is something unique to share with our extended family now and through the future as the family grows in number and variety with each coming generation.
This is our gift to the future, and to our family.
